Beginning Wednesday no new arrivals will be allowed at the Devils Garden Campground in Arches National Park in a bid to slow the spread of COVID-19/Kurt Repanshek file

Utah health officials issued an order Tuesday to discourage visitors from heading to the state's southeast corner where Arches and Canyonlands national parks are located in a bid to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus to that part of the Beehive state.

The order not only ordered restaurants, bars, and theaters in the area to close, but also restricted lodgings and campgrounds to area residents. The order banned most camping on U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands, and it was to affect Arches' Devils Garden Campground as well.

Area residents would be allowed to continue camping on public and private lands in the area, according to the order, as would "essential visitors," defined as individuals working in the area. Violations of the order would be treated as a misdemeanor.

"Arches' Devils Garden Campground will be closed tomorrow to new visitors," Lynn McAloon, spokesperson for the National Park Service's Southeast Utah Group that includes Arches, Canyonlands, Natural Bridges National Monument, and Hovenweep National Monument, said Tuesday evening. "We will allow people that are in the campground to finish out their stay if they have a multi-day itinerary. Other than that, we will not be taking any new check-ins.”

Bradon C. Bradford, who heads the Southeast Utah Health Department, said the cirumstances surrounding the expanding pandemic dictated action aimed at slowing the spread of coronavirus.

"In any other year we want to welcome people with open arms, but we are cognizant that this isn't any other year, so as much as it pains us we want to discourage tourists," he said during a phone call from his Price, Utah office.

The order was aimed at public and private campgrounds in Utah's Carbon, Emery, and Grand counties. While those counties have not reported a coronavirus case, they "are surrounded by virus activity," the order stated. 

Compounding the urgency of the matter, said Bradford, is that the Moab, Utah, hospital has just 17 rooms for patients and no ICU beds. With all the outdoor recreation that goes on around Moab -- white-water rafting, mountain biking, hiking, off-road driving -- the hospital can't risk being overcome with outdoors-related accidents when it might encounter coronavirus cases, he said.

"Pretty much every weekend all along Main Street and the surrounding streets, it's just one huge gathering of people," the heath official said. "The exact environment where we're bringing people in from all over the state, country, and still we have international visitors, that is a situation that is ripe for disease transmission given what we know about the virus. And we know that our health care system down there isn't prepared to deal with everything they normally deal with with the increased visitation, plus the potential effects of this on particularly the elderly population."

The health official said there was no desire "to come in and drive out people" from campgrounds, but that they were "trying to impress on people that now is not the right time to make your spring break trip to Moab."

"How exactly some of this is executed is new to all of us," said Bradford. "Let's get through this, let's get over this and get back to visiting our national parks and having fun."

While the Park Service will move to ban new arrivals at the Devils Garden Campground in Arches, the order does not apply to either the Island in the Sky Campground in Canyonlands, at least not currently. However, the Moab hospital is the closest medical facility to the Island in the Sky Campground.

“It’s so difficult because on the one hand there’s a lot of people who might need to be able to get outside and that the parks might offer that solace," McAloon said. "But there’s also the concern that the community, the public health folks, don’t want this to continue to be vacationland.”